You may have heard that Google went and invented a new still-image format, because the zillion we already have apparently aren't good enough. It's a disaster and Mozilla has rejected it, but they're putting it in Chrome anyway.

Oh well, despite that, I'm sure it will be every bit as successful as VP8, Orkut, Wave and Buzz were. (And Ogg, though we can't pin that one on them.)

WebP also comes across as half-baked. Currently, it only supports a subset of the features that JPEG has. It lacks support for any color representation other than 4:2:0 YCrCb. JPEG supports 4:4:4 as well as other color representations like CMYK. WebP also seems to lack support for EXIF data and ICC color profiles, both of which have be come quite important for photography. Further, it has yet to include any features missing from JPEG like alpha channel support. [...]

Every image format that becomes "part of the Web platform" exacts a cost for all time: all clients have to support that format forever, and there's also a cost for authors having to choose which format is best for them. [...]

Where does that leave us? WebP gives a subset of JPEG's functionality with more modern compression techniques and no additional IP risk to those already shipping WebM. I'm really not sure it's worth adding a new image format for that. Even if WebP was a clear winner in compression, large image hosts don't seem to care that much about image size. Flickr compresses their images at libjpeg quality of 96 and Facebook at 85: both quite a bit higher than the recommended 75 for "very good quality". Neither of them optimize the huffman tables, which gives a lossless 4--7% improvement in size. Further, switching to progressive JPEG gives an even larger improvement of 8--20%.

WebP certainly seems unnecessary; making images marginally smaller doesn't seem worth introducing a new image format when we already have several good image formats with no restrictions on their use. About the only interesting feature it has: transparency, which other lossy formats like JPEG don't seem to have.

WebM (VP8) on the other hand, seems incredibly useful since we don't have any other video formats with the same features and no legal restrictions.

Ogg Theora solved the "free format" problem, but didn't actually keep up with any modern video compression techniques. People used it because it worked passably, but it didn't really have anything going for it except for the lack of legal restrictions on it.

WebM, on the other hand, actually uses modern video compression techniques, and it credibly competes with other video formats. Plus, it has sufficient momentum behind it to get widespread adoption in browsers and other tools.

Making one image marginally smaller doesn't make much difference to most of us, but if Google could reduce the size of all the images they store by just 1%...
Although I think this is more just because they can, rather than any long term goal.

Stop with the silly FUD. Google (YouTube), Mozilla, and Opera all support it, and all of them have a LOT to lose if it was really ripe for patent infringement lawsuits. Not to mention that Skype uses it, and Flash is adding support for it.

The only people who seem to be raising that FUD are the ones with a vested interest in H.264. I wonder if that just _might_ have something to do with the Justice Department launching an investigation into MPEG-LA? Hmm!

in summary, VP8 is basically a dumbed-down version of h.264, and just because Google says it is patent free does not make it so.

usually patent trolls wait until a product has been widely adopted and it would be painful to switch away. Hence Alcatel going after LG, Apple, etc for h.264 patent infringements recently. If Alcatel or someone else went after Vp8 right now and it got painful people would just switch back to h.264.
And on top of all this is that VP8 makes absolutely no sense for mobile devices -- there is no hw support and hence performance and power consumption is poor.

VP8 is indeed a turd. Try creating an implementation based on their "documentation". The whole thing is a joke. Pure political posturing. Ain't worth a damn except to the people holding the On2 sourcecode, i.e. Google.

JPEG-2000 abuses WebP and leaves it sobbing in the corner feeling ashamed for being such a low-quality format. But since the current images formats are Good Enough, JPEG-2000 adoption is also pretty much zero.

Also 4:2:0? Doesn't anybody remember that the ratios in X:X:X are the number of samples per NTSC subcarrier? What the hell does that have to do with image formats? I demand that someone care about this esoterica!

Caring about historical esoterica would require actually understanding the reasons things are designed and built the way they are. If you're just going to be rewriting it from scratch regardless, why waste time on something like that?

I can imagine a meeting where a Google manager asks "Well, we paid $150 mil for this video format, which is kinda a lot - d'ya think we can get anything else out of it?" And so they shove it into an image format. What could go wrong?

It's Google, this is how they operate - make a load of crap, throw it at the nearest wall (the Internet) and wait for stuff to stick. If something sticks (Chrome, Android, Google Porn Search*) run with it. If it slides off, kill it based on how slippy it is.

At Google failure is an option and seems to be encouraged. It'd be nice if they failed quietly in private though, it might stop everyone else from releasing half-baked crap on us.